It’s 8.30pm, I’m wearing vintage boots and my favourite leather jacket. Outside it’s dark, save for threads of festoon lighting strung around the carpark-come-dance venue I’m at with two other friends. One friend is on the dance floor, sloshing warm wine and stories from her home town over newly made friends.
I am on the lap of my pal, let’s call her Z, who is sitting on the closed lid of a Portaloo toilet. Our arms are entangled, plastic cups of tequila and soda balanced precariously in the sink beside us. I’ve just painted our new study this colour she purrs, spritzing me with Diptique perfume, as we admire the hot orange glow of the plastic cubicle. Lipbalm? She asks, placing an oiled finger around my lips before I can answer. Give me a kiss on the cheek, I say, turning my head last minute so we hit each other’s lips – a silly game I play with my children. We fall off the stool laughing, tumbling out of the loo into the potholed evening.
Back inside we weave through throngs of sequin, denim and mesh as Dimitri From Paris drops Pet Shop boys. A girl wearing backless blue and a perfectly chiselled bob taps me on the shoulder; ‘you’re so beautiful,’ she mouths before evaporating in the direction of the bar.
Z and I make our way to the front railings, never ones to shy from being closest to the noise, closest to the sweat and sass of whoever’s spinning tracks, closest to being centre stage. A young lad leans toward me, his eyes spinning both east and west. I’ve been plucking up the courage all night to ask, he mumbles, are you single? I smile broadly, raising my left hand to point at my diamond-strung ring finger, and grin while telling him I have a husband and two children. His face screws up. I cup my hand to my mouth and shout, I’m 41! He drops his face into his hands. WTF, WTF?! I laugh, watching him broadcast the news to his friends – a sweet bunch of bouncy 20-year-olds, who quickly form a semi-circle around us, glancing up then down at us foreign specimens, animals at the zoo. One asks to see our ID. She’s not lying he shrugs eventually. Clearly this is not what he thought 40-year-old mothers do.
It's busy, but not crammed. Most people are our age. Or are they? Who knows any more. Five big name DJs play to a blackened room from 2.30pm – 10pm. Ideal mum raving, I joke to anyone that listens. Z and I start speaking French, (ish), to a girl named Elouise we’ve just met, who swears she’s 46 but looks nothing over 30. And then Dimitri drops Madonna’s Like A Prayer and we’re not sure whether to scream, or cry, so duly do both. Gripping each other’s hands over the heads of strangers, like trophies of a life so lucky to be shared. My chest’s now slick with sweat. I stink, despite the Diptique. Lipstick congeals around the edges of my mouth. We link arms, squeezing, throwing kisses between us, desperately trying to render tangible the volcano of love bubbling underneath our sticky clothes.
It's barely midnight when we roll back into our hotel room, changing into PJs, hitting the Bluetooth speaker until it finally responds. We needed that, we sigh, we needed that, we howl, we need this, we chirrup over each other, boobs and bits flashing as we flannel ourselves back to relative levels of hygiene.
It’s 3am when we finally flip the lights off, our back’s now rigid from too much dancing, our sides sore from the sharing of terrible jokes. We hold hands across the bed, the room now veiled in darkness, imagining ourselves old ladies in a home. I hope we’re still doing this fifty years from now, I say. What bit, Z asks? Having this much fun, I say. Having each other.
Me too, Z slurs, sleep already wrapping round her tongue. The other of us already snoring. Tomorrow the hotel fire alarm will wake us, sore of head but full of chest.
Love this - there is nothing quite like a night out-out with your best people. 🤩